True Love

They made love without a care or a worry and never a word to marriage for that would take away from it somehow because love was given and received freely as the sun and the grass.

They say you must truly love someone to find them beautiful when they’re asleep and he thinks it’s true as he looks at her form, naked, in recline. Like this, he can see how her breasts sag across her chest, flattening to nearly under her arms. And he can see the heaviness of her hips and thighs. Her legs are becoming varicose, the wrinkles around her eyes can no longer be laughed off as laugh lines Her face looks dead, all emotion gone. People tell him that one looks younger in sleep, but no - they look simply corpselike to him pale, immobile, and unlikely to ever move again. He resists the urge to leave the room for a shower that will wash all trace and scent and touch of her away.

She wakes up to find the bed empty. She is unsurprised.

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